Share of population in poverty ($3 a day): definition and caveats
What it measures
Percentage of population living in households with an income or consumption below $3 per day. Unit: %.
Key points from Our World in Data
- The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $3 per day. This threshold, known as the “International Poverty Line”, is set so that poverty can be compared across countries. This indicator plays an important and successful role in focusing the world’s attention on the very poorest people. The UN uses this indicator to track progress toward ending extreme poverty by 2030.
- Two centuries ago, most of the world’s population was extremely poor. Many believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible, and poverty can decline. With this poverty line, we can track whether countries are leaving the worst poverty behind.
- This data comes from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, which is based on a large collection of national survey data. To achieve wide coverage, it pools data from two kinds of surveys. For high-income countries, the data measures people’s incomes after taxes and benefits. For most low- and middle-income countries, it instead measures their consumption — a different but closely related measure.
- In lower-income countries, many people produce food for their own use or exchange goods without money. This data accounts for that by estimating what these goods would have cost if bought in the market and adding that value to their consumption.
- The exact surveys that countries run can change over time, creating breaks across which data points are less comparable. The World Bank provides an indicator of where these breaks occur, and this chart gives the option to show the breaks.
- For a small number of countries and years, the data source provides two estimates: one measuring households' income and one measuring consumption. To show a single series over time, we keep only one of these observations.
- Regional and global estimates are extrapolated to the year of the data release using growth estimates and forecasts from national accounts.
- This data is expressed in constant international dollars to adjust for inflation and differences in living costs between countries. Read more in our article, What are international dollars?
How Our World in Data processed it
For most countries in the dataset, estimates relate to disposable income or consumption, for all available years. Several countries, however, have a mix of income and consumption data points, with both data types sometimes available for particular years.
In most of our charts, we present the data with some data points dropped to present a single series for each country. This allows us to make readable visualizations that combine multiple countries. In choosing which data points to keep, we strike a balance between maintaining comparability over time and showing as long a time series as possible. As such, the exact approach varies across countries.
Further documentation
Source and producers · All share of population in poverty ($3 a day) figures.